Could someone explain how XAPI works?

General talk
1

I really don’t understand it. If someone could tell me what I’m supposed to do that would be wonderful.

2

The short answer: it depends. You can get plenty of information through the XAPI. Complete OSM data for one region; nodes, ways, relations; only specific / filtered data (such as “all hospitals in the UK” or “all camping sites around Rome”)… The usage of the XAPI depends on the type of data you want.

3

Well I downloaded the planet dump, but because it’s such a massive thing I’m having some issues dealing with the data (I’m importing it into a city generation system to develop a roadway map for a game concept I’m working on), so I want to try it on a smaller scale and see if that works (but in a more realistic fashion than doing the .25 sizes from the normal API). So basically I just need to export parts of the map as the .osm files, but can’t find a list of commands (since from how I understand it, I enter the commands into the address bar). api/0.6/map?bbox=-180,0,-100,90 was the extension I used last, but it doesn’t seem to do anything, I just get a blank page. No download or notice that it’s too big or anything like that.

4

We mostly use osmosis to cut out a particular area from a larger .osm file. If you already have downloaded the full planet file, you can pipe it through osmosis, give it a bbox, and get a cutout for your needs.

5

A bit more info here:
http://www.cferrero.net/maps/mkgmap_tiddlywiki.html#xapi
If you’re using a web browser (rather than wget) you need to put the full http address in the address bar, like:


http://www.informationfreeway.org/api/0.6/node[place=*][bbox=-9.31641,49.49668,2.28516,61.27023]

The above command will download all nodes in a bounding box around the UK, which have the place tag (e.g. place=hamlet, place=locality etc)

I don’t recommend using the full planet as a bounding box (like you have done) - you should home in on the area of interest. You can calculate bounding boxes using: http://touren.mospace.de/kachel.html

6

Alright, thanks! I need the full planet eventually, but I can’t really deal with that amount of data at once without having the computer or program crash or lag too bad. I figure that it might be easiest to separate it into fifty or so blocks and piece them together in the engine.